Visa Inc has just annouced that the Visa TIP program will be extended to the US in 2012. This follows Visa Europe's announcement in Feburary of this year of the same program for merchants in the EU region. So what is the likely impact of this announcement and why might it be significant in the long run for PCI DSS? Two good questions.

First the annoucement signals that EMV adoption in the US is set to accelerate from its current low base. As stated in the article this will close the gap between the US and the rest of the world in terms of adoption of fraud resistant technologies in card present environments (e.g. retail). Also contained in the announcement is the requirement for issuers and acquirers to provide merchants with the ability to move to these technologies no later than 2013 (yes these deadlines do have a tendancy to slip). Linked to this is the 'liability shift' which for merchants is a signficant point to consider. For all authenticated transactions no more charge backs! 

So to push the adoption along and inline with the idea that fraud prevention trumps risk management or mitigation the requirements to comply with PCI DSS will be significantly reduced for environments that qualify. The qualification is also an important point as one of the requirements is at least 75% of transactions must originate from 'chip enabled terminals'. The detail is important here, if a customer is not chip enabled by their issuer but the merchant has chip enabled terminals then does this count towards the 75%? If the answer is yes then the pressure will be on issuers to get the customers enrolled or be left holding the fraud bill. If this happens then we could see EMV arrive in the US in a meaningful way in the near future. Watch this space.